Case Studies: Criminal Justice

The Company – Text & Data Technologies

Text & Data Technologies Inc. writes software applications for a wide variety of criminal justice agencies including prosecuting attorneys, sheriff’s offices, courts and crime laboratories. Data protection is particularly important to those involved with criminal histories, jail management and county crime laboratory management.

“Providing a turnkey solution for our customers that include hardware, networking, a database file server and workstation PCs means that all areas of our support must be 100%,” comments William Verna, Text & Data Technologies’ Vice President.

The Data Protection Solution

Text & Data Technologies uses the DupliDisk (DD3) dual caddy EzRaid model to perform RAID 1 disk mirroring of their servers and for drive backup. The combination of the RAIDcase product’s advanced bus management and it’s removable drive caddy design enables users to regularly rotate an additional drive.

“We have found this to be more reliable and more cost effective than utilizing a tape drive. An entire bootable mirror drive can be moved off site or to a fireproof vault. The key-lock drive caddies provide for additional security,” continues William Verna.

DPS’ Solution: What the Client Says

“Apart from being very competitively priced, we chose DPS’ DupliDisk (DD3) because it is operating system independent, which is important when our customers are running NT, 2000 and LINUX. In all areas, the drive mirroring is transparent and there are no OS-driver conflicts or other similar issues. Also, one of the benefits of using DupliDisk is that a background rebuild can be initiated when the mirror drive is replaced, which eliminates downtime.”

“DupliDisk (DD3) is far more than just a backup. From our perspective, it enables us to manage, rather than react, to server hard drive crashes. The customer can continue to work, and we can plan together when the server goes down for maintenance. Combining disk mirroring and drive backup with the DupliDisk is a much better alternative than re-routing technicians, disrupting schedules, and most importantly, having our customer’s system down for an extended period.”

Verna concluded by saying “When it comes to service, we have found Data Protection Solutions by Arco to provide excellent service and technical support. They are friendly, competent and easy to deal with.”

Unique Product Features

DPS’ DupliDisk3/4 (DD3/DD4) IDE/SATA RAID 1 controller provides real-time drive mirroring. If your hard drive crashes, your computer continues to run smoothly with no data loss. The product operates by writing data both to your original drive and to a backup drive. DupliDisk3:

DupliDisk3:

• Uses virtually any operating system.
• Requires no system resources.
• Document changes occur simultaneously on the primary and mirror drives.
• No delay time and writes are automatic.
• Sounds an alarm and automatically switches all operations to backup should your hard drive fail -your system
continues to operate with no downtime or loss of data.
• No high costs or complicated installations.
•Requires no device drivers, uses no IRQ or system memory, so it causes none of the software or hardware conflicts that plague computer systems.
•Causes no software or hardware conflicts.